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Thimbleweed Park: A new adventure game from Ron Gilbert & Garry Winnick!

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I get the feeling that he decided Kickstarter was most successful as a straight nostalgia play, and he's at least half-right. I think Kickstarter is a way to leverage trust, and for games the very quickest way to trust is to make a game just like the games everyone 'knows' you can make.

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Yeah I mean. I gave money because I don't want to miss out. I don't actually think this is a game style I would actually want them to revisit. At least I'd be happier if they made an adventure with updated graphics NOT but not in the play style of The Cave. The Cave was very pretty though.

 

Or just something different again, like DeathSpank.

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I loved the LA adventures for their story mostly but also for their presentation which was AAA in it's time. Seeing MI on an Amiga 500 was amazing.

 

Sure, I can still go back and enjoy Monkey Island to this day, so I won't judge unfairly. But time has passed and games have evolved - the verbs were terrible even back then and every LA adventure seemed to find a way to reduce them until they virtually went away and transformed into a mouse cursor icon.

 

I just wish they would have picked a later game to continue their retro legacy. Like The Dig which was also a fantastic adventure IMO.

 

Also, I don't really like Twin Peaks as I incidentally found out recently so that story doesn't do that much for me.

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I think I'm just bothered by how Zak McKracken and Maniac Mansion looked and controlled more than anything. The way the characters are drawn are this weird ugly a big headed thing that I don't find charming like the way an old Sierra AGI adventure is still pretty cute in it's chunky sprites. I supposed a lot of the EGA Sci Sierra stuff lost it's charm for a bit though, but I think generally Sierra most games just suffered from bad artists.

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I'm excited about this game for its pedigree and the ambition shown in number of inter-crossing characters/timelines, but not for its aesthetic or verb system.

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Frankly, it's been so long since an adventure game didn't reduce all interacting to "use" and "look", I'm kinda hyped to use the verbs again. It also means you get to "pick up" every character and hear them say "They're not my type."

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I wonder how much of the appeal depends on which adventure era you grew up with. I´ve always considered Zak McKraken and Maniac Mansion rather unpleasant to look at, a little too crude, whereas MI2 hits the sweet spot when it comes to pixel-y glory (Day of the Tentacle heralding the more animated 'cartoon' style). Had I been 5-10 years older, would the Thimbleweed Park style been to my adventure taste?

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It's weird, my dad did have Maniac Mansion installed on the computer, but I ignored it for the early Sierra adventures instead. It didn't really appeal to me until later. I consider myself starting with Monkey Island because it was my first LucasArts adventure to just devour start from finish. I didn't know what I was getting into loading it up. It was just a free game in a sleeve that came with this CD-Rom drive my dad probably spent way too much money on. I think it was a promo with 9 games included. Besides edutainment stuff my dad would pick up for cheap (he only bought games for cheap, pirated the rest from his coworkers, couldn't really pirate CDs at that point) those were pretty much the only games we had on CD for a few years after that.

 

Oh yeah, one of the other CD games was Loom! It made the "play Loom" joke in the Monkey 1 Scumm Bar particularly hilarious to me, because that game was sitting right on the desk and I had no interest in loading it up based on the picture. Guess who played Loom after that?

 

EDIT: Now I'm wondering what other games came with this pack. Maybe 9 was too much. I found someone on the Double Fine forums who definitely must have gotten the same thing we had, since it came with a Sound Blaster 16 which sounds about right: http://www.doublefine.com/forums/viewthread/6011/P360/#216637

 

EDIT 2: Found it! Some guy was selling it second hand in 1994. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/cmh.forsale/iZdhAQTl-OA (Why is this on Google Groups?)

 

I don't remember the Sherlock Holmes game at all and we had Lemmings forever at that point. Don't think I even bothered with the racing game.

 

USELESS POST!

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Rodi, MI2 was the sweet spot for me as well. I'm sure it's partially an age thing, but also just that the art in MI2 was so strong and the palette so vibrant. I played all these games *well* after they came out (I started with CoMI and worked my way backwards) and still came away impressed with MI2's art.

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What's funny to me is Sierra was always the one on the cutting edge of technology back then, starting with the scanned art well before Monkey 2, but a lot of their art tended to be so sloppy or bland in many of the games. It was very inconsistent with only the later games in a series having great art direction. Also Sierra tended to use a lot of traced video frames for their characters in later games (did this start with King's Quest 6?) while the pixel animation being done at Lucas was often very smooth, high in frame rate for the time, and had overall more personality. I'm not even just referring to Steve Purcell even though his animation early on was the most prominent.

 

The Zak McKracken, Maniac Mansion, and Labyrinth era seem worlds apart to me compared to the Scumm games starting with Last Crusade.

 

Anyway, all I can ask is that Thimbleweed part does not reinstate the "what is" verb. Come on now.

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Sierra definitely had LucasArts beat in terms of art and animation until Last Crusade.  That was the game where they upped the ante with the character animations - some of Purcell's earliest work.

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So happy that this one made it clearly through it's initial Kickstart run. Now just to wait for the final product.

 

The development blog has been up for a few weeks now.

 

blog.thimbleweedpark.com

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The Thimbleweed Park weblog has also expanded to a weekly podcast, which is kind of fun to hear how this two-man team is putting the game together.

 

In the most recent blog entry, Gary Winnick gives some inside information about Maniac Mansion character creation!
 

When we created Maniac Mansion back in the 80's we were basically just getting wet behind the ears and nothing was sacred, our interests in all forms of media, friends, families and significant relationships were all fodder for the adventure game grist mill. Even my girlfriend at the time, ‘Rae', who became ‘Razor' wasn't off limits (as far as I know, she never microwaved a hamster), nor was the head of Lucasfilm Games accounting, Wendy. If I remember right, Sandy was someone at ILM Ron had a little schoolboy crush on. We won't even get into who Dr. Fred, Nurse Edna and Weird Ed were...

 

Man, this takes me back to my days endlessly refreshing the SCUMM Bar website...

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Haha I forgot about the podcast after two episodes, but I'm going to get current now. I love the story from Gary where he talks to a detective concerning a fraudulent bill in the mail and it turns out the detective was psyched since he's a big fan of Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island. He then backed Thimbleweed via Paypal. I love this story.

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Now's your chance to contribute to really have your work be part of Thimbleweed Park.

 

https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/library_books

 

Make up a book, give it a title, and an author (that can be you), and write two pages of text consisting of around 100 words each. It's that simple.  If your book is accepted, you'll also appear in the credits.

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And so the time flies. Thimbleweed Park has a release date! March 30th!

 

Finally it is close. Now Tim just needs to raise the pot and give the release date of Full Throttle Remastered!

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this is currently my most highly anticipated video game

 

(mostly because lately I'm only ever in the mood for small-scale, slow-paced video game experiences... but also this looks like it will be good)

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I'm really looking forward to it too. I didn't back the Kickstarter as it came across as too much of an exercise in nostalgia at that point, but having followed the development blog and podcasts, I'm impressed at how it's evolved - particularly the pixel art, which is now looking really intricate and atmospheric. Poking around in the Photoshop file Ron posted to illustrate an art asset export tool in this post was the turning point for me - that work-in-progress background is fantastic, so much attention to detail.

 

I'm hoping the humour and the puzzling will live up to my expectations, as this game looks to be just what I need right now.

I'm kicking myself that I forgot to contribute a library book! Oh well. Did anyone else here write one?

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I'm kicking myself because I forgot to take part in the phonebook audio message contribution that was part of the Kickstarter backer thing. I also did not have the time or energy to write a library book for the game...

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After missing out on adding a vocal backing track to that one Idle Thumbs theme with all the backing vocals, there was no way I wasn't gonna be in that phone book.

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Ron chats about Thimbleweed Park with Google for 50mins!

 

 

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Oh man, it's so close, soooooo close now!

 

I noticed that in addition to the phone book message I forgot to take part in the Ransom swearing jar thing, what was that about?

 

Here's by the way a really interesting article about The Secret of Monkey Island:

 

http://www.filfre.net/2017/03/monkey-island-or-how-ron-gilbert-made-an-adventure-game-that-didnt-suck/

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